Buy the Audiobook Download:

About The City & The City

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

About The City & The City

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

BONUS: This edition contains a The City & The City discussion guide and excerpts from China Miéville’s Kraken and Embassytown.

About The City & The City

New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other–real or imagined.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

About China Miéville

China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including This Census-Taker, Three Moments of an Explosion, Railsea, Embassytown, Kraken, The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and… More about China Miéville

About China Miéville

China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including This Census-Taker, Three Moments of an Explosion, Railsea, Embassytown, Kraken, The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and… More about China Miéville

About China Miéville

China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including This Census-Taker, Three Moments of an Explosion, Railsea, Embassytown, Kraken, The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and… More about China Miéville

People Who Read The City & The City Also Read

Inspired by Your Browsing History

People Who Read The City & The City Also Read

Inspired by Your Browsing History

Praise

“Daring and disturbing . . . Miéville illuminates fundamental and unsettling questions about culture, governance and the shadowy differences that keep us apart.”—Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress

"Lots of books dabble in several genres but few manage to weld them together as seamlessly and as originally as The City and The City. In a tale set in a series of cities vertiginously layered in the same space, Miéville offers the detective novel re-envisioned through the prism of the fantastic. The result is a stunning piece of artistry that has both all the satisfactions of a good mystery and all the delight and wonder of the best fantasy.”—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days

“If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler’s love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Mieville’s new novel, The City & the City." —Los Angeles Times

“China Mieville has made his name via award-winning, genre-bending titles such as King Rat, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council. Now, in The City & the City, he sets out to bend yet another genre, that of the police procedural, and he succeeds brilliantly…. [An] extraordinary, wholly engaging read.” — St. Petersburg Times

“An eye-opening genre-buster. The names of Kafka and Orwell tend to be invoked too easily for anything a bit out of the ordinary, but in this case they are worthy comparisons.” — The Times, London

“Evoking such writers as Franz Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov, Mr. Miéville asks readers to make conceptual leaps and not to simply take flights of fancy.”—Wall Street Journal

“An outstanding take on police procedurals…. Through this exaggerated metaphor of segregation, Miéville skillfully examines the illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An excellent police procedural and a fascinating urban fantasy, this is essential reading for all mystery and fantasy fans.”—Booklist, starred review

Awards

Author Q&A

An Interview with China Miéville, author of The City & The CityQuestion: Cities are a central theme in many of your novels. What is it about “the city” that fascinates you?

China Miéville: I’m almost certainly the worst person to answer this – I think writers are generally not the best people to understand their own predilections. But yes, pretty much all my books feature cities to some larger degree or other. I’ve lived in big cities all my life, particularly London, which is imprinted through me as if I was a stick of rock. (I don’t know if that reference works in the US?) I like the palimpsest of cities, the mix of architectural ages, aesthetics, social groups. I like the fact that everything is distinct and mixed up and makes a totality which isn’t reducible to the sum of its parts. I suspect I’m becoming a cliche, though: maybe I’ll have to write a book set in a desert to spice things up a bit. Q: Do you have any favorite cities (real or imaginary)? And have those cities had any influence on your writing?CM: Oh plenty. The division between the real and imaginary cities is not hard and fast, either: I love the real London, the real Cairo, the real Havana, but I also passionately love those cities as they are filtered through fiction and art. The represented London, for example, in the works of De Quincey, Iain Sinclair, Dickens, Gaiman, Machen, et many al, is at least as important to me as the real one, in terms of influence. New York, Providence, Prague (all in real and imagined forms). When it comes to entirely imagined cities, Viriconium, Imrryr, Philip Reeve’s Traction Cities, Celephais. The cities in Mary Gentles’ _Rats and Gargoyles_, and Gene Wolfe’s _Book of the New Sun_. The real Harare didn’t particularly capture my imagination, but as filtered through Dambudzo Marechera’s work, it did.

Q:What inspired you to depart from previous works and write your first police procedural?

CM: Various factors. I wanted to write a present for my Mum, who was a huge fan of crime novels: though she really liked my books, none of them were precisely her sort of thing, so I wanted to write something that was both exactly my sort of thing and exactly her sort of thing. I’ve been interested in the field a while – a large number of writers I respect enormously are huge crime readers, particularly I think because of the rigour you have to have over structure and narrative, so I wanted to take part in that. It’s interesting to try to write books that are outside your immediate purview. There’s also the fact that urban police procedurals involve a lot of dgging around in the undergrowth and the specificities of their settings, which appealed because I was very into by the setting I’d come up with, and thought a crime novel would be a good way to foreground it without subordinating plot.

Q:Did your writing in this new genre require any special research on technique?

CM: I was very concerned that, as I have no track record in this area, I shouldn’t seem to be crashing in clodhoppingly, breaking the china and generally being disrespectful (as one sometimes sees from ‘mainstream’ authors jumping into the genres I’m associated with). What that meant was that before I started, I steeped myself in crime. I’d always read it on and off – usually when something was recommended by my Mum – but I went on a binge, revisiting old favourites and trying some new, going for the most feted writers as well as trying some more underground names. I relied a lot on the recommendations of trusted friends. I also went for a lot of stories with non-British or -American settings, as my own setting is rather different. So I tried very hard to write something absolutely respectful of the field, in terms of its structure, narrative rigour, and attempting to be part of it, investigating various different traditions of crime novel. (Police procedurals, conspiracy thrillers, whodunnits.) If I’ve done my job right, there’s no cheating – although I would say that one of the things I most like in some crime novels are the moments of gap, when something marvellous – not supernatural, necessarily – intrudes, when there’s an ellipsis that you as a reader can’t enter and you’re left with a sense of exciting estrangement. I find that tradition in particular in European crime novels. I stress that I don’t mean logical *cheating* – so much as a slightly oneiric momentum. A lot of eastern European novels have that sense that you’re walking in a landscape as much slightly dreamy/psychic as real. And in the English tradition, I’d say that some of Holmes’s leaps of logic while not in any way formally fantastic achieve their effect by a sort of cognitive estrangement – they are formally realistic without being realistic at all. That’s not a criticism – it’s praise.

The other thing that was important to me was about voice. Because pace is very important in a crime novel, I wanted to experiment with a rather different voice than in my other books. They’ve tended towards very baroque prose – this is more pared down, attempting fidelity to a different set of traditions. There’s no ‘better’ here – I still passionately love lush prose, when it’s done well. But it’s good for you as a writer, I think – and I hope for readers too – to try different things, to experiment and change.

Q:The cities in The City & The City are imaginary, but you positioned them in Eastern Europe. Why select this location?

CM: Are they in Eastern Europe? Are you sure? They *might* be. At least roughly. There are various clues as to their *approximate* locations but the stress is very much on the word ‘approximate’ there. The cities of the title are two very different cities, both in different ways tilting towards distinct (if, inevitably, overlapping) psychogeographic traditions. Their locations are ways of mediating those traditions, and the cities places within them. This I realise is an evasive answer. What I will say is that Eastern European writing was, for various reasons, extremely important to this book – Bruno Schulz, Kafka – and that flavour I hope comes through. (Hazy lines, though: so was Mitteleuropean writing – Alfred Kubin – though. And, in a mediated way, French. Also American – Chandler. This is not to disavow the Eastern European, which was particularly key.)